Charles Ogden (1889-1957) was a linguist and a language philosopher: to him the word was as real as any other object in his hands. He demonstrated this by recording the very voice of James Joyce himself. The reading was made in August 1929 at King's College, London. By mentioning the year of that recording, we inevitably notice that the first quarter of the twentieth century grouped together quite a number of remarkable events. 1. The phonograph had been invented before 1900. 2. Tom Stoppard, in his play Travesties, describes how, in 1917, in Zurich, Joyce, Tzara, and Lenin sat not far one from the other in the very same room. 3. The BBC came into being in 1922. 4. During the same year, Ogden published his own translation into English of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which had been written in German the year before. 5. The same year, 1922, saw the publication of Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land. Whether Joyce had read Wittgenstein is the great question that nobody can answer. 6. Ogden's own The Meaning of Meaning was published in 1923: it made the relationship between sound and meaning the essence of Modernism. 7. In the 1930's, Ogden published two other major books, Opposition, and Basic English. The textbook-writer John Lyons considered Ogden's Opposition to be one of the best discussions on the subject.

The reason we are publishing Ogden's books now, as a theoretical backup for James Joyce Lexicography, has something to do with the fact that there is a close relationship between Ogden's two major achievements. One achievement was that he made publicly known the recording of Joyce reading a fragment of the book he was writing in 40 languages at once. Ogden's second great achievement was Basic English: he believed that English could be, and was, in fact, the key to the one and only international language. Ogden's ideas of Meaning, Opposition and Basic English seem to lead straight into Joyce's own thoughts constantly hovering in his mind during the 17 years while he was writing Finnegans Wake.

Quite remarkable is the fact that Alexandru Graur, member of the so-called Academy of the Socialist Republic of Romania, wrote a book in which he described Basic English not only as an "imperialist" act, but also as the most "reprehensible attempt".

Ogden' three books, now grouped under the heading Theoretical Backup, posit major questions for Joyce researchers: What made the British linguist Charles Ogden record James Joyce reading from a book far from being finished at the time? What theoretical threads can possibly connect Ogden's major books to the recording of Joyce's voice, the only one of its kind to this day? And, last but not least: Why exactly did Joyce accept to be recorded?

We, as the publishers of this series, do hope the diligent reader will certainly manage to find his own answers.

Bucharest, Noël 2013

C. George Sandulescu & Lidia Vianu

Theoretical Backup for the Lexicon of Finnegans Wake. C. K. Ogden, edited by C. George Sandulescu, is formally launched on Wednesday 11 December 2013. The volumes are available for consultation and downloading on receipt of this Press Release, at the following internet address:

If you want to have all the information you need about Finnegans Wake, including the full text of Finnegans Wake, line-numbered, go to the personal site Sandulescu Online, at the following internet address:http://sandulescu.perso.monaco.mc/

If you want to have all the information you need about Finnegans Wake, including the full text of Finnegans Wake, line-numbered, go to the personal site Sandulescu Online, at the following internet address:http://sandulescu.perso.monaco.mc/

NOTE: You have received this message because you or a friend of yours
added your email address to our mailing list. If you do not wish to
receive any further communications, please let us know at the email
address above.